Levels of abstraction and stylesheets
(A CSS Lover's Lament)

In 1995 a number of interested parties met near Versailles in France
to discuss the possibilities of defining stylesheets for the web. The
problem was that browser makers were adding presentation markup to
HTML, and that was wrong. We needed to act fast to stop HTML being
pushed in the wrong direction.

The required solution had to be easy to implement, simple to use, with
an upward development path. The result of that meeting was CSS, which
was released as a recommendation only a year later.

Now we are more than a decade on, and we can conclude that CSS has
been a success, at least in its adoption. But it is beginning to show
its age: it was designed in an age of static pages, where presentation
possibilities were too meagre and people had to resort to using images
for styling, even for fonts. Modern website builders are having to
resort too much to scripting to achieve effects that could easily be
available in stylesheets.

But there is also a question of levels of abstraction. The author of a
book looking at a contract from a publisher will have a different view
of what is content and what is styling from the publisher, who is likely
to consider the content to be the name of the author and the royalties
offered, and the rest to be presentation.

This talk will analyse what the needs of modern styling are, where we
should consider the levels of abstractions to be, and where CSS fails
to meet these needs, and how we might approach finding a solution.

===

- Berlin talk about essence. Linux levels of hardware abstraction

Some problems

Layout facilities
       Blocky
       No proper reordering of elements

Authoring
	No definition mechanism
	No constants
	Matrix of elements to properties problem

Selectors
	A mess

Accessibility
	Pixel perfection
	Image replacement problems: only hacks

Lack of Fonts

Implementability
	Taken too long to get interoperability
	Acid test a sign of failure

Slow development
     Essentially stopped

Alternate stylesheets not sticky as you click through
Should apply html page to css not v.v.